Day 25: Billings MT - Regina SK

Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes Western Half-Devil Monster Face in Leftpondia - Part 3

I have been asked "Please relay approved manner for tea softening of Stroopwafels".  OK.

You will need a fresh cup of really hot tea.  Or coffee.  Coffee is probably more Dutch anyway, and good luck with finding hot tea in USAnia, as legendary misery-guts and sometime drummer Mr P "Ginger" Baker so eloquently noted on the Masters Of Reality track "T.U.S.A.".  Simply place the stroopwafel on the rim of the cup and let the rising steam soften the stroopwafel until you can't stand the sight of it sitting there begging to be eaten any more.  Then eat it.  Repeat until there are none left which, in my case, was about an hour ago.  You can achieve the same effect by putting the packet in the cupholder of your convertible and driving top-down from Battle Mountain to Bonneville.  If you have a convertible.  And you happen to be going that way.

I wouldn't have enjoyed today's drive very much even if I didn't have a clod and a cough that makes me feel like someone is trying to unscrew the back of my head every time it surfaces.  And a headache.  And I don't think Thomas enjoyed it much either.

"Ha ha, suxx0r!" chortled Thomas.  "You can pack everything while I have an extra forty minutes in bed!"

Two hundred miles of trying to make the "miles to empty" wossname on the Ratmobile's fuel gauge match Emily's distance to the required exit from I-94.  At one point the difference was down to two miles but then it started going back up so I bottled it and bailed early for more motor-spirit.

I-90 and I-94 mostly follow the Yellowstone River for those two hundred odd miles, which does not lead to visual excitement.  The most exciting thing was actually this:

Pompey's Pillar

Pompey's Pillar, as it is known, looks like a chunk of cliff that accidentally wandered across the river and then sat there for millennia waiting to be discovered which, at least as far as the white man is concerned, happened when William Clark (of "Lewis and..." fame) passed this way in the early 19th century.  It bears the only remaining physical evidence of the L&C Expedition as Clark, the terrible pikey, carved his name on it.  Leading inexorably to the occasion when members of the 6:57 Crew were apprehended carving "Pompey Stabbers: Kick To Kill" on Stonehenge.  Thomas stayed in the Ratmobile, because it was raining.

So finally we turned of I-94, or it turned off us and MT-16 took over.  This is less flat than the Yellowstone Valley, but is in most other respects equally drear.

Even the thrill of crossing the Missouri failed to wake Thomas from his slumbers

This is the sort of thing Thomas slept through:

and who can blame him.  Crossing the border into Canuckistan, unsurprisingly, did not change the landscape one iota.  I was expecting the Prairie Provinces of Canada™ to be how they appeared in the New Golden Encyclopedia for Tinies, viz. armies of combine harvesters patrolling fields the size of Salisbury Plain but it was all too lumpy with some kind of geological left-overs for that.  At first, anyway.  Nearer Regina it get much more stereotypical.

We diverted a little off the route to visit Radville, at which revelation Miss von Brandenburg is possibly nodding sagely and the rest of you are scratching your heads and muttering "Where?" into your stroopwafel-crumb-filled tea.  Or coffee.  Here's why:

And here is the famous Long Creek Saloon:

Hot nut machine included

It had been a long day for both of us but fortunately this place popped over the horizon in the nick of time:

"Typical BRITISH toilet humour!" observed Thomas.
"It's only 88 km to Regina" replied Mr Larrington.  "Would you rather walk?"

88 km later and I am here and full of clod and out of stroopwafels.  Can they be sent as an e-mail attachment?